Sunday, March 17, 2013

Thoughts Inspired By Our First Jesuit Pope

Esoteric ramblings

The Jesuits were the intellectual vanguard of the Church at the time after the Reformation. They covered themselves in glory for centuries fighting the Protestant heretics and converting the savages of the New World, especially in South America. If you want to read about true heroism read about the English Jesuits who volunteered to leave the safe harbor of Continental Europe and go back to Protestant Elizabethan England and were tortured horribly and executed for being Catholic priests:

Then they produced a warrant for putting me to torture. They had it ready by them and handed it to me to read. (In this prison a special warrant is required for torture.)

I saw that the warrant was properly prepared and signed, and then I answered, 'With God's help I shall never do anything that is unjust or act against my conscience or the Catholic faith. You have me in your power. You can do with me what God allows you to do - more you cannot do.'

The confidence that comes with a reply like that -- totally missing in the Western man of today. All gone.

Being intellectuals, however, they fell for the Modernist heresy at the turn of the 20th century more than any other Catholic order and went from being the Pope's most trusted footsoldiers to being a nest of revolutionary subversives.

All that orthodox Catholics despise they pushed in the Church and society throughout the 20th century. Multiculturalism, feminism, homosexuality, communism, contraception and abortion, the whole rotten ball of wax. The decline of the major U.S. Catholic colleges into complete apostasy is largely their doing.The brilliant French philosopher Blaise Pascal had their number as far back as the 17th century. Even when they were still very good Catholics, their belief in and promotion of casuistry was seen by Pascal as a destructive system of thought that would eventually end in laxity and corruption.

Casuistry is basically situation ethics, I don't care how many theologians say it isn't, that is exactly what it is. The Jesuits would teach that you could commit an evil to serve a greater good as long as you didn't intend to commit the evil you knew you were committing. They didn't say it that way but that is exactly what they stood for. It's a very important theological point that has been lost in the honorless world we inhabit today:

Pascal properly foresaw that someone who could lie to promote a greater good AND convince himself he wasn't really lying at all was capable of doing and justifying any kind of behavior, including grave evil.

Thus, for Pascal, and I agree with him, the betrayal of the Jesuit order centuries later was preordained by their lax moral code.